Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Walmsley

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, in the Localism Bill we have been setting out to create neighbourhoods that are involved, vibrant and powerful. If you do that you will create a band of people whose first care is the education and well-being of their children. They deserve to be connected with primary schools, particularly ones that serve their children, and that is what this amendment does. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 113ZA in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, who mentioned to the Committee on Monday that she is not able to be in her place today. I assume, therefore, that she will not be speaking to Amendments 113A and 113B, but I do not have my name to either of those.

First, I thank the Minister for his amendments in this group and pay tribute to my honourable friend Dan Rogerson MP, the Member for North Cornwall, whose powers of persuasion in another place were so great that he managed to convince the Minister for Schools, Mr Nick Gibb MP, that we need the government amendments that we find in this group. The amendments ensure that school governing bodies are more representative of school communities. However, students play a central role in these communities but at present cannot become school governors. We have put down this amendment to try to ensure that students can serve as full members of school governing bodies.

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ensures that children are involved in all decisions that affect them and that their views are given due weight in accordance with their age and maturity. I very much welcomed the statement by the Minister for Children, my honourable friend Sarah Teather, in December 2010, that the convention would be given due consideration when making new law and policy. I now urge the Committee to consider how students’ rights to participate in decision-making can be strengthening through their involvement in school governing bodies. In 2009 the Committee on the Rights of the Child said:

“Respect for the right of the child to be heard within education is fundamental to the realization of the right to education … Steady participation of children in decision-making processes should be achieved through, inter alia, class councils, student councils and student representation on school boards and committees, where they can freely express their views on the development and implementation of school policies and codes of behaviour. These rights need to be enshrined in legislation, rather than relying on the goodwill of authorities, schools and head teachers to implement them”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am grateful for what my noble friend has said. I do not really think that saying that the system at the moment has its defects is a good reason for adding to them. I very much hope that, in what happens between now and Report stage in terms of an understanding of the Ofsted mechanisms and in discussions between ourselves, we can firm this up. It seems to me to be a serious disaster in the making and a very wrong step the Government are looking at.

I want to pick up on a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. Clause 40(2) removes the compromise that we reached at the end of that long and, as he says, acrimonious debate. I very much hope the Minister will take the time to read that debate and to understand why that clause got into the 2006 Act. It was a compromise, carefully worked out by the then Government, to deal with questions about the way in which faith schools fit into the system. By removing that compromise you are reopening the whole argument as to that relationship and inviting a repeat on Report of the experience of 2006. I hope the noble Lord, if only in preparation for that, will read through that debate. I am sure we will revisit this in October. I hope that between now and then we will have made some progress.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, this has been a very thorough and rigorous debate and I do not intend to summarise the whole of it. I will respond only on my own amendment as the Minister has been intervened upon a number of times. My understanding of what the Minister said in response to my amendment was that there is no reason to believe that outstanding schools will not take safeguarding seriously. Without intending to be rude to the Minister, I wrote in my notes, “Well, we are hoping for the best then”. Frankly, I do not agree that if somebody is good at one thing they are necessarily good at another. Only on Monday I talked about my own grandsons, one of whom is brilliant at maths and the other is brilliant at English. I think the same applies to schools.

The Minister said that Ofsted will now carry out a survey, but I understand that there are currently no plans whatever to inspect safeguarding regularly in schools that are regarded as exempt—and therefore will not be regularly inspected—unless, of course, the Ofsted survey advises the Government that there is no correlation between a school being good academically and being good at safeguarding. Can the Minister just nod if I am correct in that understanding of his reply?

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Walmsley

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I have Amendments 32 and 32B in this very mixed group of amendments about selection, religion and admissions. The Minister has been very clear about the duty of academies to comply with the admissions code so, as with the previous group of amendments, I accept that it does not need to be in the Bill. I presume that it will be in the funding agreement.

Amendment 32 was laid after our discussion in Committee about selection. While I accept in general my noble friend’s assurance that,

“The Bill does not allow for any increase in selection by ability in the state-funded sector”—[Official Report, 28/6/10; col. 1563],

it occurred to me that if a selective school became an academy and then expanded the number on its roll, that would mean more actual children in the area being selected by ability. So I laid this amendment to say that such expansion should not increase the number of children in the relevant area who are selected by ability. However, I accept that this duty would be difficult for an individual school to achieve, especially when I went back and read what the Minister reminded us about the ability of selective maintained schools that are not academies to expand by 25 per cent within the normal admissions consultation. In the light of that, I think that what I am asking for in my amendment would be pretty well impossible. Therefore, I am using the amendment to ask my noble friend who would have the responsibility of watching out for a large expansion of selection by ability among schools both inside and outside the control of a local authority when a lot of new academies are created, given that some of them will be former selective schools that are opting out.

Amendment 32B was originally laid in Committee as Amendment 135. I do not believe that the Minister addressed the matter in his reply, but I forgive him because, as he does today, he had several topics to deal with in the grouping. I believe that these ridiculous groupings have arisen because of the minimal time that we have had between Committee and Report; noble Lords have not had enough time to scrutinise the draft groupings and to make some sense out of them. Amendment 32B would require the governing body of a school with a religious character, if it converts to an academy, to use the fresh start as an opportunity to look at its religious character and to decide whether it wishes to change it. Since the school was first set up, there may have been a big change in the demographics and cultural mix of the catchment area. That may lead a governing body to consider whether it wishes to join together with another faith, or more than one, or to make a larger percentage of its intake inclusive of people of other faiths or none. It would not prevent those governors from making no change at all, but it would give them an opportunity specifically to consider their duty to promote community cohesion and to make a change. It would not interfere with their discretion to make their own decision in any way; it is not prescriptive at all. I commend it to the Minister.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, in this group I have Amendment 10A, which follows on from the discussion in Committee about the effects of Clause 1(6)(d). My noble friend Lord Hill said that paragraph (d) would not prevent an academy from reaching out to areas that were not in its immediate vicinity in order to broaden its intake. It would not prevent a grammar school that became an academy from maintaining its current and typically wide catchment area. Also, to take it even further, it would not prevent an academy from being or becoming a boarding school. I asked my noble friend what, under those circumstances, the paragraph would prevent that the Government wish to prevent. He has not replied, so I presume that there is nothing and that therefore the paragraph has no function. That is my reason for returning to the matter on Report.

On the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, the crucial bit of the model academy funding agreement appears to me to be clause 12(c). Reading that, I do not see what in the agreement—although, like my noble friend Lady Walmsley, I have not parsed it as carefully as I might—updates the requirement as the general admissions requirements change. It seems to me that an academy that was created tomorrow would be for ever stuck with today’s admissions arrangements, even if we improved them in a year’s time. I do not see what in the model funding agreement rolls the requirements forward. That would also apply to SEN requirements and other matters that are dealt with in clause 12. I would be grateful if my noble friend could give me some comfort about what keeps academies current.

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Walmsley

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

The noble Baroness invites my noble friend to return to the days of an old new Labour Government; I do not agree with her. Actually, we did not agree with her at the time. We spoke against these pupil-parent guarantees as being motherhood and apple pie without any legal levers at all, so she will not be surprised to learn that we do not support her amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My noble friend’s Back Benches are in complete accord.